This week, The Air Show Podcast (which is worth listening to — Brett, Brian, and Jon, are definitely smart and sort of funny guys) had Emirates President Tim Clark as a guest. Clark is one of the brightest guys in the industry, and he also has an incredibly depth of knowledge, since he has been running Emirates longer than I’ve been alive.
The entire interview is interesting, but there’s one thing he said that stood out to me, which I’m a little skeptical of…
Emirates’ Tim Clark claims other airlines sabotaged the A380
Emirates and the Airbus A380 basically go hand-in-hand. The airline found more success with the whale jet than any other airline, and it ordered nearly as many of these as all other airlines combined. One certainly wonders where Emirates would be without the A380 (and for that matter, the A380 probably wouldn’t exist without Emirates).
Unfortunately the final A380 was delivered in 2021, as Airbus just couldn’t justify keeping the program alive, as much as Emirates pushed for it. Other airlines just didn’t want such a big plane. Fortunately these planes will keep flying through 2040 or so, so we have another 15 or so years of showering and going to the bar on an airplane.
Anyway, Clark loves to talk about the A380, for obvious reasons (he’s always pushing aircraft manufacturers to develop bigger planes). So he was asked about why the A380 program went the way it did — why could Emirates make it work so well, while other airlines couldn’t (if you want to listen to it, this part of the conversation starts around 31 minutes into the podcast)?
Clark correctly points out that other airlines simply didn’t order enough of the planes in order to scale their networks, and that a super hub like Dubai really allowed the plane to reach its full potential. After all, you can have A380s arriving from Frankfurt, London, Milan, Paris, and Zurich, then connecting passengers to A380s flying to Bangkok, Hong Hong, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, and Sydney.
He also said that Emirates created a special product onboard, while the interiors of other carriers’ A380s looked like DC-10s. Ouch. But that’s all fair enough, right?
Here’s where it gets really interesting, though. Clark then went on to say the following:
“The American carriers weren’t having anything to do with it anyway, because in those days, this was the weapon in the armory of Emirates, so you need to stop using them, because that allows them to go to Airbus to build more and more and more, so none of them bought the airplane.”
He was then asked if he was serious about that comment, and responded with the following:
“In the time of the rift, there was a clear mandate in the Star group, do not buy the A380, because it gives immense power to them. If we don’t buy it, eventually its demise will come about. And in truth, that’s what happened.”
“Who could say to me you could fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo with the A380, whether United, American, or Delta, and not make money? I don’t think so. Or go from Los Angeles to Sydney.”
For those curious about “the rift,” this refers to roughly a decade ago, when there was a huge battle between the US carriers and Gulf carriers. Essentially the US carriers were trying to restrict US access for Gulf carriers, arguing the airlines were “illegally” subsidized. Go figure United now partners with Emirates, American partners with Etihad and Qatar, and Delta plans a close partnership with Riyadh Air. Lolz.
In a rare instance, I disagree with Tim Clark!
I think Clark’s biggest strength and biggest weakness is that he has been in Dubai for 40 years. So he has an incomparable depth of knowledge when it comes to building one of the world’s most revered airline brands from the ground up. But I also think he sometimes forgets what a special situation Emirates is in.
Were other airlines rooting for the Airbus A380 to fail? Probably. Was that at all a motivating factor in carriers like American, Delta, and United, not ordering the A380? No way. It’s funny, because Clark acknowledges the reasons the A380 doesn’t work for other airlines, which is that you need a super hub like Dubai, and it also helps to have traffic flows where a passenger can connect from one A380 to another A380.
None of that reflects the reality of the US airline industry. US airlines need to have multiple big hubs throughout the country, given that the United States is a little bigger than the United Arab Emirates. 😉 Furthermore, US airlines face a ton of competition from foreign carriers in their home market, while a lot of Emirates’ demand comes from poaching passengers from other airlines, by transiting people via Dubai.
The most obvious sign that the logic doesn’t add up, though, is to just look at the reality of the fleets at the “big three” US carriers. How many have ordered the Boeing 777X? Zero. That’s not to spite Emirates, but it’s because they just prefer to fly smaller long haul aircraft, with a disciplined approach to capacity, to keep yields high (the same is true domestically — just look at how overrun our most congested airports are with regional jets).
US airlines are so heavily focused on joint ventures and schedule, so they want to have more frequencies in markets. Demand from the US is also a lot more seasonal than it is in the UAE, given that UAE is geographically sort of “the center of the world,” in terms of connecting people.
It’s also interesting to hear Clark comment about how there’s no way that a US carrier wouldn’t make money flying an A380 between Los Angeles and Tokyo. I think most US airline executives would have a different take. And I also think Clark fails to consider that US airlines actually barely make money flying passengers, but instead, much of their profits come from their lucrative credit card deals.
So I agree with Clark that many airline executives were probably happy to see the A380 ultimately fail. However, I don’t think the desire for failure was a motivating factor in those airlines not ordering the plane.
Bottom line
Emirates President Tim Clark has a lot of interesting insights, and in a recent interview, he claimed that other airlines sabotaged the success of the Airbus A380 in order to weaken Emirates. He claims that US airlines would’ve succeeded with the A380, and that the Star Alliance had a mandate to not buy the A380.
Personally I think this logic is a bit of a stretch. I’m bummed that A380 production was ultimately discontinued, and I’m also a huge fan of the aircraft, and think it’s not surprising that Emirates found success with it. However, outside of something like the Gulf region, I’m not surprised the plane never caught on.
What do you make of Clark’s comments about the A380?
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